1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording apparatus which records images on a recording medium based on recording image data, more particularly, to a method and means for transferring and storing the recording image data, and further, to a method and means for printing the stored data.
2. Description of the Reacted Art
Recently, with the spread of personal computers, word processors and facsimile machines in offices, printers of various recording systems have been developed as output terminals of these apparatuses. A serial printer performing a recording operation for each line can record characters and images. Particularly, the serial printer is suitable for printing characters at high speed by allowing a recording width for every line to correspond to the size of the character. The serial printer develops a line of printing information from image data in a memory, and forms a recording image by scanning recording elements with respect to a recording medium based on the developed recording image data.
With the spread of multi-media in recent years, the information handled by computers has extended even to natural images and voices in addition to characters, and in a recording apparatus which is one of the output terminals, the opportunity of recording not only character/letter but also image/graphic image such as natural image has been increased.
With such technological development as described above, a high resolution of the recording has come to be required in order to perform image recording with high definition. In the case of recording the image/graphic image, it is necessary to perform the recording operation with a resolution higher than that of printing of character/letter.
The conventional recording apparatus is provided with a storage means such as a memory in order to store recording data for a predetermined recording area. When the recording operation of higher resolution is performed, the number of the picture element data to be recorded will increase, and the recording area to be recorded by recording data stored in the memory having the same storage capacity is smaller than that of a low resolution of the recording operation. Therefore, the storage capacity of the conventional memory may be insufficient when performing the high resolution of the recording operation.
The cost of a readable/writable memory device (RAM: random access memory) depends on the storage capacity. Since the cost of the memory device increases with the storage capacity, the use of the memory device of high storage capacity may lead to an increase in cost and such a memory device is not suitable for a printer of personal use.